Lefty Prof's List: International

• Although the motto of the horizontal protest movements was “this revolution won’t have a face”, it is precisely a recognisable face that served as a tailwind for the success of the new left parties. The challenge they now face is how to bridge the gap between horizontality (“direct democracy”) and verticality (“party politics”); how to overcome this traditional problem of all left politics and put in practice – in the context of representative democracy – the principle of “radical democracy”?
• The second big challenge is the question of the state. The closer left parties come to power, the more accusations we hear that they are not radical enough any more. The greater the possibility that they could form new governments, the more they are accused of being “social democrats”. It seems social democracy has become the big bad wolf again.

• After the kidnapping, for more than two weeks Israeli authorities put on a show of looking for the missing teens — the whole time whipping up anti-Arab sentiment, raising hopes of a recovery and marginalizing voices of dissent. When the abductees were found murdered, the Israeli public was outraged and demanded vengeance. Shortly after the funerals for the youths, another group of Israeli settlers beat and burned to death a 16-year-old Palestinian teen, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. This incident was followed by a brutal assault on Tariq Khdeir, a 15-year-old U.S. citizen and cousin of Mohammed’s by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

• Another fact that is less known — but perhaps more important — is that within hours of the three teens’ disappearance on June 12, Israeli officials knew that they were dead. Yet for the next two weeks authorities put on a phony rescue effort, instituted a gag order to prevent the public from knowing the truth and rallied the Jewish domestic and diaspora populations in anticipation of their move against Hamas.

   

  Knowing that the teens were already dead, the Israeli government even sent the mothers of the abductees to the United Nations’ Human Rights Council to raise international awareness and plead for their boys’ safe return. Then the IDF launched Operation Brother’s Keeper, the most extensive military operation in the West Bank for more than a decade, under the auspices of saving the missing teens whom, again, they knew to be deceased.
• Israel has offered no concrete proof to implicate Hamas — instead identifying as its prime suspects a rogue faction with a history of defying Hamas’ leadership and sabotaging the group’s peace-building efforts. They were identified early on, meaning that Israel knew full well that neither Hamas nor its armed wing (al-Qassam Brigades) were behind the boys’ disappearance.

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• since ISIS is allegedly bankrolled by private Salafi businessmen in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Oil Gulf, the US is on the opposite side of all its former allies of the 1980s. In some ways, some of the alleged stagnation of US policy in the Middle East may derive from a de facto US switch to the Iranian side on most issues, at the same time that US rhetoric supports Iran’s enemies in Syria and elsewhere in the region.

• with little fanfare or coverage, America’s lead diplomat stood before the shadow war industry and itemized the integration of the State Department’s planning and personnel with the Pentagon’s global counter-terrorism campaign which, she told the special operations industry, happen “in one form or another in more than 100 countries around the world.”
• Although the new administration did officially re-brand “The War on Terror” as “Overseas Contingency Operations,” Team Obama employed an increasingly elastic interpretation of the 9/11-inspired Authorization for Use of Military Force and expanded covert ops, special ops, drone strikes and regime change to peoples and places well-beyond the law’s original intent, and certainly beyond the limited scope of CIA covert action.
• Essentially, the Whole-of-Government approach is a re-branded and expanded version of Pentagon’s doctrine of “Full-Spectrum Dominance.” Coincidentally, that strategy was featured in the Clinton Administration’s final Annual Report to the President and Congress in 2001. It defined “Full-Spectrum Dominance” as “an ability to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with forces tailored to specific situations and possessing freedom to operate in all domains—space, sea, land, air, and information.”
• In 2001, Full-Spectrum Dominance referred specifically to 20^th Century notions of battlefield-style conflicts. But the “dark side” of the War on Terror stretched the idea of the battlefield well-beyond symmetrical military engagements. “Irregular warfare” became the catchphrase du jour, particularly as grinding campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the reality that the full spectrum still wasn’t enough.
• This Whole-of-Government shift signaled a renewed willingness to engage on variety of new fronts—particularly in Africa—but in a “fast and flexible” way. With other agencies—like the State Department—integrated and, in effect, fronting the counter-terrorism campaign, the military footprint becomes smaller and, therefore, easier to manage locally, domestically and internationally.
• At the SOFIC’s Special Operations Gala Dinner in 2012, Hillary celebrated the integration of diplomatic personnel and Special Operations military units at the State Department’s recently created Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications—a “nerve center in Washington” that coordinates “military and civilian teams around the world” and serves “as a force multiplier for our embassies’ communications efforts.”
• Establishing “host country partners” is the nexus where the State Department, its Conflict Bureau and the AFRICOM meet—implementing the Whole-of-Government strategy in emerging or current conflict zones to fuse a mounting counter-terrorism campaign with stabilization, modernization and state-building initiatives, particularly in oil and resource-rich areas like the Niger River Delta, Central Africa and around AFRICOM’s military foothold on the Horn of Africa.

• Although he’s been criticized as feckless and deemed less hawkish than Secretary Clinton, President Obama’s newly-proposed Counterterrorism Partnership Fund (CTPF) is the logical extension of the Clinton-Gates Global Security Contingency Fund and epitomizes the Whole-of-Government shift.

   

  The $5 billion Obama wants will dwarf the $250 million pooled into the GSCF and will, the President said at West Point, “give us flexibility to fulfill different missions including training security forces in Yemen who have gone on the offensive against al Qaeda; supporting a multinational force to keep the peace in Somalia; working with European allies to train a functioning security force and border patrol in Libya; and facilitating French operations in Mali.”

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• If racism was the ticket for the fascist parties to pass from the margins to the central political scene, Islamophobia ensured that their seat would be Business Class. Islamophobia offered the adhesive tissue for the alliance of Le Pen and Wilders.
• The Muslim citizens of Europe, and the immigrants and refugees who came from Islamic countries especially in the last decade due to imperialist wars, offered the convenient enemy that smoothed all these variations. That’s why all far Right parties, regardless of what “wing”, embraced Islamophobia as a key component of their strategies. Islamophobia also offered something that no previous form of racism had offered: an argument that reached deep into progressive audiences, utilising classic themes such as the protection of women’s rights and gay rights, religious tolerance, etc.
• Thus, the old-fashioned — although now “modernised” — fascism of Le Pen ended up hiding its anti-Semitism behind the more modern variations of Islamophobic racism like that of Wilders. And all this with the stamp of decisions and policies legitimised by the European Union.
• the EU (or EEC and its ancestors) was never “the House of Peoples”. Its constitution always satisfied two simultaneous, if contradictory, needs that were ideologically dressed up with progressive clothes.
• The first one was its appearance in the global market as a single economic bloc, against strong competitors, mainly the U.S., Japan and, later, China. It is worth saying that even after the experience of the Second World War, the establishment of “European identity” was no stranger to racist attitudes and racial stereotypes:
• The second was the need to manage ethnic tensions between states and the national capitalisms within Europe that had previously led to successive wars,
• And, of course, all nationalisms are coming back for good. Conflicts between lenders of the North and borrowers of the South are getting an increasingly national colouration: the “disciplined” Germans and the “responsible” Scandinavians against the “lazy” Greeks, the “irresponsible” Italians, and so on.
• These parties reflect parts of national capital and political personnel (mostly of right-wing parties) that invest in a different form of bourgeois rule, at a time when the projects of European integration and capitalist globalisation are in crisis.
• the tasks of the Left in Europe are configured as follows: we must first build a mass anti-fascist movement to challenge the political legitimacy of the fascist parties and their ability to sow hatred everywhere, from neighbourhoods to parliaments.
• Beside the mass anti-fascist movement, we need a broad anti-racist campaign to answer the lies of the government and the fascists against migrants and refugees.
• Particularly, the Left should be prioritising the fight against Islamophobia, which is the cutting edge of modern racist discourse.
• Finally, the Left should provide its own political alternative to capitalist crisis and the undemocratic crescendo of the European Union. Rather than spending its political capital to maintain the illusion of a democratic reform of European institutions and a “better” eurozone (SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras’ candidature for the EU presidency is part of exactly such a strategy), the Left should seize on the delegitimisation of the EU to win over the working-class masses of Europe to an anti-capitalist perspective.

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• Given Israel's strategy to welcome talks while always making certain that an actual agreement is never reached, it's hardly surprising to find that yesterday's critics of negotiating with "only" one Palestinian faction are today's critics of negotiating with a "unified" Palestinian side.

• IT REMAINS to be seen whether this most recent Fatah-Hamas effort at reconciliation will fare better than other stillborn attempts at unity in recent years, but there is little reason to think so--or even to hope--for this outcome. That's because this is a unity based on the short-term survival needs of the rival factions, not an agreement to adopt a promising new strategy in response to the failure of the "peace process."

   

  Both Fatah and Hamas seem unable to imagine a political or diplomatic strategy beyond the mantra of a "viable Palestinian state existing side by side with the state of Israel." So any unity that might emerge would amount to an awkward embrace between rivals, bereft of ideas about what to do next. The only virtue of unity under such circumstances is that it allows each side to share the inevitable price to be paid for their own record of failure.

• But if Fatah and Hamas are tragically adrift, Israel is frighteningly focused. Israel is in the grips of a political zealotry that has the goal of ethno-religious supremacy at its heart. If Israeli politicians were interested in cementing their domination, they would give the Palestinians what they're asking for--a "state" that would rule over a shattered economy totally dependent on Israel, reduced to providing a cheap and easily repressed labor force, semi-attached to Israel's booming industrial economy and largely shut out of access to essential natural resources such as water and land.

   

  Such an arrangement wouldn't provide justice for the great mass of Palestinians, but it would likely succeed at further ensuring that the Palestinian elite, tamed by years of waiting to assume the mantle of statehood, would have renewed political capital and perhaps even enthusiasm for restraining the aspirations of millions of Palestinian workers, farmers and refugees.

   

  The fact that Israel didn't jump at this deal only exposes the exterminationist drive at the heart of the Zionist project. Like all colonial doctrines, Zionism rests on a dehumanization of the land's indigenous people in order to justify the "cleansing" of the land.

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• Africa is on the brink of an era of unprecedented growth, but it is still hampered by “woeful” progress on trade reform and broken promises by the world’s wealthiest countries, an international commission has concluded.
• While many African countries are attracting much more foreign investment with new business-friendly policies, they are still failing to spend enough on health and education, and they are encumbered by wealthy nations that have failed to reduce their farm subsidies or negotiate trade deals with Africa

• The commission’s most famous recommendation in 2005 was a call for the doubling of foreign aid to Africa. It persuaded the G8 and other donors to commit themselves to debt relief for Africa and a doubling of their aid flows by 2010. Under their pledge, Africa would receive an additional $25-billion (U.S.) in aid annually by 2010 in a concerted push to reduce poverty. 

   

   But in reality, the wealthy nations fell far short of their promise. Their aid for Africa increased by just 60 per cent of the promised amount, and much of this went to high-income and middle-income countries, rather than the poorest African countries, the commission says.
• On debt relief, the G8 has done better, providing $100-billion (U.S.) in cancelled debts, allowing Africa to spend an extra $1.5-billion annually on other needs.
• dramatic progress in AIDS treatment, malaria prevention, primary-school education, child immunizations, and investment in infrastructure.
• no improvement in higher-education funding,
• The commission had called for a 50 per cent increase in irrigated farmland by 2010, but instead it increased by just 0.9 per cent.
• Africa still accounts for only 3.3 per cent of global trade
• Although the African economy grew by an average of 6 per cent annually from 2003 to 2008, much of this was due to resource exports
• Donors should provide $10-billion to $20-billion (U.S.) annually to help Africa cope with climate change, the report said.
• The commission’s members include Mr. Blair, former British prime minister Gordon Brown, former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa, South African Planning Minister Trevor Manuel, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Botswana central bank governor Linah Mohohlo, Canadian MP Ralph Goodale, and musician and activist Bob Geldof.

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• Only a handful of developed countries have met a pledge to increase foreign aid to 0.7% of their gross domestic product, while in some countries aid is declining.
• 14% of children still die before their fifth birthday.
• In 2008, 32% of people in sub-Saharan Africa were undernourished, a proportion little changed since 1990
• Although the proportion living on less than $1.25 a day declined, the overall number in poverty has risen to more than 400 million.
• The U.S. has released its strategy to reach the goals, including providing an extra $63 billion for healthcare in developing countries, $3.5 billion to help improve agricultural production and $30 billion to help countries adapt to global warming.

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• Many people seem not to understand, or refuse to understand, that more than half of Somalia consists of the seas around the country. This makes the oceans vital to the survival of the Somali people.
• Somalia has territorial waters of 200 nautical miles (nm), based on Law No. 37 on the Territorial Sea and Ports, of 10 September 1972. This law states clearly that fishing in territorial waters and the regular transportation of persons and goods between Somali ports is reserved for vessels flying the Somali flag, and other authorised vessels with a licence and permission from the legitimate Somali government and not by a regional government.
   
   States like the USA do not like to recognise and/or respect this law and pressurise states to give up their 200nm of territorial waters established by acts of law. Meanwhile, for reasons of national sovereignty or security the USA has not even ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and pushed for alterations to its provisions, which would otherwise curb their rights.
• It was the USA who was the first country to expand its territorial waters beyond the common idea of the old-world states, which had claimed since medieval times only three nautical miles (the distance where it could be enforced by a canon shot from land) as their territory on the sea. Using the customary international law principle of a nation’s right to protect its natural resources, US President Truman in 1945 extended US control to all the natural resources of its continental shelf. Other nations were quick to follow.
• Illegal weapon transports like that allegedly done by the MV Faina, French research vessels prospecting for oil or foreign-flagged vessels fishing illegally in Somali waters certainly have violated this basic Somali law.
• Article 10 of Somali Law No. 37 also stipulates that since 1972: ‘Foreign warships are not allowed to pass through the territorial sea (200nm) unless they are authorised by the Somali Government.’ That was and is the rule and was internationally respected and enforced from 1972 until 1991.
• it has become clear to anybody that piracy originating from the Somali coast and maritime crime committed by Somalis cannot be exterminated by a naval armada violating the rights and sovereignty of Somalia and the Somali people. Laws are made and should be enforced to avert and fight injustices, but not to create new injustices.
• Today, after 20 years of civil war, and while the Somali government and the Somali population, which never in Somali history has been so weak and vulnerable, outside forces believe they have an ideal moment to press for the twisting of legal history solely for their own interests.
• Even when we are down on our knees and have to sometimes beg for help, the so-called international community has to first and foremost respect Somalia’s sovereignty and laws before they can be accepted as friends. Gifts in the form of Trojan horses must be rejected and those colluding with such scams must be seen for what they are: traitors and enemies of the Somali people.

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• Long gone are the days when the capital Algiers was seen as the Mecca of revolutionaries all over the world from Vietnam to Southern Africa, who desired to bring down the imperialist and colonial order. Times are bygone when Algeria was audacious and undeterred in its foreign policy, when: a) it supported anti-colonialist struggles all over the world, b) the question of Palestine and Western Sahara were at the top of its foreign policy priorities, c) it significantly supported (in financial and military terms) the Palestinian cause in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, d) it broke its diplomatic relations with the US in 1967, e) it played a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement and hosted its 1973 summit in Algiers, which strongly denounced the intolerable logic of structural inequality in the global system, benefiting already-privileged countries at the expense of the proletariat nations. Long gone is the era when Algeria engaged in a delinking experience to break away from imperialist domination. It sadly renounced the pursuit of an autonomous national development that involved a certain degree of economic and political confrontation with imperialism. The infitah (economic liberalization) of the last three decades ended up assigning the country to a status of a dependent of imperialism and an exporter of energy within the neo-colonial framework of the international division of labor. [5]
• Alas, recovering national sovereignty from French colonialists was not accompanied with the recuperation of the popular sovereignty, through building a strong civil society and actively involving the masses in public life in a democratic way. These are absolutely necessary conditions in sustaining the resistance to Western domination. The new pathology of power (to borrow Eqbal Ahmad’s words) observed in the authoritarian and coercive practices of the nationalist bourgeoisie, the demobilization, and de-politicization of the rural and urban masses, was at the heart of the subsequent dismantling of the national development project and replacing it with an anti-national one.
• In his chapter on “the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness” in the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon foresaw this turn of events. He strongly argued that unless national consciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into a political and social consciousness, the future would not hold liberation but an extension of imperialism with its divisions and hierarchies.
• This comprador bourgeoisie does not produce, but rather, consumes what it imports and seriously undermines vital public services such as health and education, which are deteriorating year after year. The Mafiosi-like oligarchy is neoliberal by religion and has no regard for the future of the country and its population. It is parasitic and rapacious as it preys on the economy and maintains an endemic corruption (responsible for a series of recent major corruption scandals that touched important sectors of the economy, including the most strategic of them all: the energy sector). It is entirely subordinated to the international system of economic, political, and military domination, and therefore, represents the true agent of imperialism and its useful accessory.
• This largely comprador regime is the biggest threat to the sovereignty of the nation and must surely be overthrown. However, it is necessary to make sure that this fall should occur within a national context and will not lead to the instauration of another regime submissive to imperialism.

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• With the crisis in northern Mali and the French government's military intervention in its former colony, the Tuareg have become a focus of attention in the West in a new way. In both the mainstream press and in United Nations resolutions, they have been wrongly conflated with Islamic jihadists, while their legitimate grievances against the Malian government have been ignored.

• Who are the Tuareg and what are their demands? Are they asking for a separate state? On the left-wing website Counterpunch, Patrick Cockburn argued in January, "The latest crisis has its origin in a nationalist uprising by the Tuareg in 2012."

   

  This is partially right, but the nature of Tuareg nationalism--and the demands of the uprising--have to be explored more concretely, or the Tuareg's calls for economic relief and an end to state repression will be overlooked.
• In practice, though, the uprising didn't begin with a demand for a separate state.
• THE TUAREG speak Tamasheq, part of the Berber language group. They are a majority Muslim group of a million-and-a-half people living in Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso.
• The Tuareg have always had a strange relationship with French colonialism. During the consolidation of French Sudan--which became the Republic of Mali after independence--the colonialists met fierce resistance from the Tuareg, including a major anti-colonial uprising in 1919. Though the French won, they remained wary of the Tuareg, whose knowledge of the desert region made them formidable enemies.
• The colonialists developed a romantic fascination with these desert-dwellers.
• Since military control of the Tuareg was never feasible because of the problems of desert combat, the French granted the Tuareg a great deal of autonomy.
• For this reason, sub-Saharan Malians in the South resented the privileged position that the Tuareg were afforded by the colonial state.
• The Tuareg are the dominant ethnic group in the desert and in Kidal, but are a minority even in the two biggest Northern cities of Mali, Timbuktu and Gao. Although they make up less than 10 percent of the Malian population, the nomads have had a disproportionate impact on the fortunes of the Malian state since its founding in 1960. At three key junctures, they were decisive in the fate of the state as a whole.

• Mali might not have been founded in the way it was if the Tuareg hadn't entered into a deal with the Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (US-RDA), an African-socialist political party made up mostly of sub-Saharan Malians.

   

  The US-RDA, after securing an alliance with the Tuareg, negotiated the terms of the French withdrawal. Battling a national independence movement in Algeria, the French decided to pursue a different strategy in French Sudan. They peacefully turned over the reins of power to the US-RDA, hoping to co-opt the new leadership, instead of fighting them. And indeed, there has been a very close relationship between France and the Malian government since independence.
• Then Amadou Toumani Touré, the once-popular leader who replaced Traoré, was overthrown in a military coup in March 2012. Again, it was a Tuareg uprising, begun in January of that year, which triggered the eventual coup. Amadou Haya Sanogo, a low-level officer trained in the U.S., whipped up hatred of Tuareg among other ethnic groups as his justification for the coup.

• TO CATEGORIZE a group of nomads as a "nation" may or may not be appropriate. It is an especially complicated question in post-colonial Africa, where colonial meddling in territorial boundaries forever changed power relations between indigenous groups.

   

  Nevertheless, the Tuareg share a language and a history, and see themselves as a coherent group. They are unquestionably oppressed by the Malian state. Between 1964 and 1967, they were subjected to a fierce campaign of forced sedentarization, away from their traditional nomadic lifestyle. In the tradition of the colonial masters, the Malian state continued to appoint Tuareg chiefs and leaders, overturning democratic choices made by Tuareg clans. The use of Tamasheq was forbidden in schools.
• The Tuareg have always claimed a right to self-determination in the Azawad, the desert region of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya. If part of this right rests on the claim that they have historically dominated the area, though, then that claim is complicated by the question of slavery.

• Undoubtedly, though, some Tuareg did fight for Qaddafi. The members of Tinariwen, for example, met in military training camps in Libya in the early 1980s. Qaddafi did hire Tuareg as mercenaries, and at various points, for his own strategic and political reasons, the Libyan dictator patronized the Tuareg cause.

   

  This fact alone, though, doesn't make the Tuareg claim to self-determination illegitimate. As they were robbed of their traditional way of earning a livelihood by both environmental change and state policies, there were few ways for the Tuareg to survive. Their demands for autonomy are legitimate, and their struggle clearly continues after the death of Qaddafi.

• In 1996, the Bourem Pact ended the second Tuareg uprising. The Malian state, with the support of the international community, both states and NGOs, devoted some $9 million for a Disarm, Demobilize, Reintegrate (DDR) program that provided cash for weapons to the rebels, credits for small businesses and increased funding in infrastructure. Schools and health care centers were built, and an additional $150 million was pledged for reconstruction. The city of Kidal got electricity for the first time in 1996.

   

  In return for their agreement to lay down arms, Tuareg administrators gained greater powers of self-governance

• THE TUAREG question is an international one. More Tuareg live in neighboring Niger than in Mali, and there, too, they have organized a movement against state repression--their most recent uprising ended in 2009.

   

  Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou said, "The threats in Mali constitute a domestic security problem for Niger"--and sent 500 soldiers to the international peacekeeping force in Mali, imploring the international force to disarm the MNLA. The Niger government signed a deal with the U.S. to host a base for surveillance drones.

• So while it is right in a sense to talk about a "nationalist insurgency," it is important to note that Tuareg poverty is, more than anything else, the driving impulse for a people who have learned that armed struggle works in wresting economic concessions from the state.

   

  This is important to recognize because Western governments and the UN have spent a lot of time "rejecting" the Tuareg's right to self-determination.

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• Africa today is trailing [behind] the rest of the world because in part the African leadership has failed to mobilise its people along the lines of a Pan-African agenda that informed the earlier phases of our political development.
• This is due to its weak ideological base, which, instead of drawing from such a heritage, is wedded to Western ways of knowing and doing things which we have derived from their educational institutions without questioning, including Christian and Muslim religious influences

  • 1. Note the slippage from "Western ways" in this paragraph to "external interventions" in the next.
    2. In what sense are Muslim religious influences "Western"?! Or even "external" to Africa for that matter?
• The result is that the African economic and political scene continues to be open to the outside world for exploitatio
• Recent statistics show that as much as US$150 billion dollars is filtered out of the continent annually by African leaders who place this ill-gotten wealth into their personal bank accounts.
• We cannot therefore blame foreigners alone for the continents’ depraved condition.
• African culture is used negatively in the form of ‘political tribalism’ to gain political advantages and not in their interests. Indeed, the political divisions on our continent are directed in compounding ethnic difference
• Even the very idea of ‘nation-building’ that was the song of the first generation of African leaders turned into political divisions based on ‘tribal’ differences, which were very much the creation of colonial ‘divide and rule’ ideologies of the imperialist powers but which we continued to exploit.
• We as African political and economic elites have played an active role as agents in these calamities that have bedevilled our continent. We always blame these problems on the ‘colonialists’ and ‘imperialists’ while at the same time playing the role of executioners of our own people.
• The calamities that bedevil the continent at the present moment are a continuation of the policies of the past, which African leaders, under neo-colonialism, have continued to pursue.
• what is being called the ‘global economic meltdown’ is in actual fact a crisis of capitalism on a scale never imagined before.
• neo-Keynesian recipe resulted even in a more serious ‘stagflation’ that could no longer be responded to by the Keynesian ‘priming of the pump’ strategies to overcome cyclical crises. It required a ‘Chicago’ response of monetarism led by Milton Friedman which championed the financial revolution.’ It is this ‘revolution’ that came to a halt in the 2008-2009 ‘meltdown.’
• First, we have to look at how we can survive the crisis. For the first time, we have to wake to the reality that we need a food security policy as a matter of urgency about which we can no longer dilly-dally. That means we have to focus on the home market firstly, the regional market secondly and the global market lastly.
• The forum’s vision would require us as members of the Nile Heritage Initiative to be committed to the process of ‘empowerment’ of the ‘ordinary people’ of the continent, while at the same time or as part of this process, engage in policy dialogues with all ‘stakeholders.’ But we do know that a people that are disempowered by existing power structures cannot engage with those same power structures that are responsible for their exploitation and disempowerment because it is their weaknesses created by disempowerment by those power structures makes such dialogue meaningless. The real question is whether the empowerment of the African exploited masses can be achieved through policy dialogues or through other means?
• This raises the question of our role in society as ‘organic’ intellectuals or civil society organisations engaged in some form of intellectual and/or society intervention activities. Our role must go beyond policy engagements to promote the interests of the marginalised and poverty-stricken citizens. It must involve a process of unlearning and learning not only of the disempowered masses but also of the disoriented intellectuals who have been alienated from their cultures and heritages by Western culture, education and material inducements.
• As Professor Hubert Vilakazi of South Africa has observed:
• The tragedy of Africa, after conquest by the West, is that her intellectuals, by and large, absconded and abdicated their role as developers, minstrels and trumpeters of African civilisation. African civilisation then stagnated; what remained alive in the minds of languages of the overwhelming majority of Africans remained undeveloped.
• the biggest spiritual and mental challenge the African intellectuals face of their massive re-education process can only be provided by the African ‘uncertificated’ African men and women who live largely in rural areas. He concludes:
• ‘We are talking here about a massive cultural revolution consisting, first, of our intellectuals going back to ordinary African men and women to receive education of African culture and civilisation. Second, [this] shall break new ground in that those un-certificated men and women shall be incorporated as full participants in the construction of the high culture of Africa.
• A non-African cannot play the role the African elite are required to play in the transformation of their society. Therefore, the new approach seeks to build on the unity of the two social forces as necessary for the reconstruction of Africa from ruins inflicted by Europe.
• Just like Vilakazi, who would like to see the African intelligentsia, being tutored by their ‘uncerticificated’ men and women to jointly produce a new African high culture that would be at the base of the African Renaissance, Y. V. Mudimbe too would like to see the emergence of a ‘wider authority’ of a ‘critical library’ of the westernised African intellectual’s discourses developed together with ‘the experience of rejected forms of wisdom, which are not part of the structures of political power and scientific knowledge.’
   
   This is a useful reminder despite the fact that Mudimbe himself, according to the African philosopher D. A. Masolo: ‘lamentably fails to emancipate himself from the vicious circle inherent in the deconstructionist stance’ of how this ‘usable past’ should be used by African ‘experts’ to construct an ‘authentic’ African episteme. In short, if we are to join the African masses in transforming the continent, we must move towards establishing a truly Pan-African University. The object of the Pan-African University is indeed to overcome this epistemological divide between the ‘uncertificated Africans’ and the African intelligentsia.
• Afrikan languages must therefore have to be at the centre of developing the university at all African community sites of knowledge.
• Language, as Cabral rightly pointed out, is at the centre of articulating a people’s culture.
• Mucere Mugo quotes Franz Fanon who wrote: ‘to speak a language is to assume its world and carry the weight of its civilisation’.

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• farming is truly back on Africa's agenda.
• "Africa's agricultural sector has the potential not only to feed its own people but to become the breadbasket of the world," Dr Lindiwe Majele Sibanda said in Windhoek. 
  
   "Africa also has 60 per cent of the world's uncultivated arable land, and the potential exists for African yields to grow in value by more than three-fold by the year 2030, from $280 billion today to $880 billion."
• Sibanda is the CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, which held its Annual High-Level Policy Dialogue in the Namibian capital from Aug. 30 to Sep. 3.
• In Accra, 3,500 kilometres north-by-northwest, the fourth African Green Revolution Forum kicked off with similar optimism. Here, more than 800 people are participating in a three-day meeting in the Ghanaian capital to agree on a strategy for investment in African agriculture to enhance food security and drive economic growth.
• Malawi transformed itself from a recipient of food aid in 2005 to a net exporter of maize in each of the past four years. Rwanda increased its food production by 15 percent in 2007 and 16 percent in 2008.
• In Tanzania, a government programme supporting farmers with vouchers to purchase seeds and fertilisers enabled 700,000 smallholder farmers to produce five million tonnes of maize.
• The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimates that Africa will need $32 to $39 billion of investment annually to realise the full economic potential of its farm sector.
• AGRA chair, Kofi Annan, who was awarded the Borlaug Medallion from the World Food Prize for his global leadership and commitment to food security, said Africa needed this massive investment in agriculture because of a lower density of critical infrastructure than Asia had at the inception of its Green Revolution in the 1960s.
• 19 countries have put in place plans to accelerate their annual agricultural growth by six percent a year
• Challenges to African agricultural growth include poor soils and seeds, lack of finance and markets, and weak policy support. These have been compounded by climate change and threats to biodiversity and natural resources, which has compromised soil health and water availability.
• New Partnership for Africa's Development Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA) Chief Executive Officer, Ibrahim Mayaki, urged the Forum come up with concrete actions on how to fast-track agriculture transformation on continent.

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• A NEW scramble for profit is sweeping Africa--foreign investment in agricultural land on a massive scale. Referred to as a "land grab," the privatization of millions of acres of land is helping to fuel a crisis of hunger and displacement across the continent.
• Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, India, Korea, Libya and Egypt have all jumped on the land grab bandwagon, but agribusinesses and private equity firms from Europe and the U.S. are also joining in.
• According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), foreign buyers have invested $30 billion since 2006 to buy around 50 million acres of farmland. Up to 10 million acres have been sold in Sudan alone.
• We're talking about a new interest in acquiring control over farmland itself...
• THE TREND toward land privatization emerged over the past decade, but shifted into high gear with the food crisis of 2008
• A UN report released in June predicts that food prices could rise as much as 40 percent over the coming decade.
• The Indian government's stated goal is to limit the purchase of food grains from the international market and source it directly at much cheaper rates from poorer African countries. At the end of the last decade, prices of wheat, rice and corn increased threefold. The governments involved in large-scale land acquisitions claim that their investments will give the languishing agricultural sector in Africa the much-needed boost besides providing employment to the local peoples.
• African governments have falsely claimed that land available for sale is unused.

• The Oakland Institute think-tank released a report on the African land grab, which points out:

   

   Experts in the field, however, affirm that there is no such thing as idle land in...Africa...Countless studies have shown that competition for grazing land and access to water bodies are the two most important sources of inter-communal conflict in [areas] populated by pastoralists.

   

  According to Michael Taylor, a policy specialist at the International Land Coalition, "If land in Africa hasn't been planted, it's probably for a reason. Maybe it's used to graze livestock or deliberately left fallow to prevent nutrient depletion and erosion. Anybody who has seen these areas identified as unused understands that there is no land...that has no owners and users."
• as activist Vandana Shiva puts it, "We are seeing dispossession on a massive scale. It means less food is available and local people will have less. There will be more conflict and political instability and cultures will be uprooted. The small farmers of Africa are the basis of food security. The food availability of the planet will decline."
• Africa has lost 20 percent of its capacity to feed itself over the past four decades. Ethiopia alone has 13 million people in immediate need of food assistance, yet its government has put over 7 million acres of land up for sale.
• The head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, has gone so far as to warn of "neocolonialism."
• A new World Bank report, The Global Land Rush: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? is due to be released soon.
• As GRAIN, an initiator of the petition, put it, "The only thing holding back this massive transfer of lands and water from local communities to foreign investors is the strong social resistance that has emerged."

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